skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Free markets" are never perfectly free or even close to it. Only the writers of utopian libertarian science fiction think that.

The question is how you manage that lack of freedom and to whose benefit you try to manage it. I prefer it be managed towards the general stability of society. Of course it will be managed in an imperfect way but I prefer the goal be a stable society.

edit: The government intervening will never really make the market more free but it wasn't free to begin with (see robinhood today). So you lose a bit more freedom but you shift the benefit of the overall loss of freedom from "a bunch of rich people get richer" to "society as a whole get's richer and more stable." Not fully but a bit further.
Not exactly. It would be as if the bank that mortgaged your house then prevented people from buying it, then turned around to you and said "See? Nobody wants it! You need to lower the price. Oh! What's this? The price has gone down, I need to reposses it. Thanks, come again!
This is a simple yet brilliant idea. Now for an analog version...
Welcome to the stock market
That's an inaccurate characterization, as anyone reading these threads can easily see.
Commenters saying that this is understandable and simply how margin trading works might be missing this part of the story:

https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2021/1/28/keeping-customers-...

>We also raised margin requirements for certain securities.

Is that how margin trading always works? The broker can just without prior notification increase your collateral requirement and liquidate you instantly?
That's not a counter point. The IB Chairman explicitly said they put in the restrictions to protect market makers rather than their customers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RH4XKP55fM
Well that all depends on how much your friend respects your privacy and sadly many of them don't do.

And by the way, that scenario is possible with any data that your friends have from you on any platform. They can technically copy your data from any source to other platforms.

If you share it, it isn't private anymore.
They are mitigating the risk to themselves since if the user turns insolvent RH will still be out the margined amount. If they cash the user out, even if user has 100% loss, they save themselves.
The White House? This”rumor” doesn’t make any sense
Huge long shot, but do you happened to have a copy of Radargrammatry by Daniel Levine?
DCE is also extremely valuable when writing lisp macros. Not having to do DCE in the macro is saves a lot of code.

There is a talk by Kent Dybvig called "the macro writer's bill of rights" on YouTube that goes into optimizations that help macro writers.
Pull requests are the best form of communication. Have you ever had a user propose a feature, agree to contribute it, and go dark? A pull request says "I did this work, I think you might want to use it". Even for repos that aren't accepting contributions, it's better to have pull requests so that users can fork and apply PRs themselves than not have anything. Even if the original organization isn't interested in open collaboration and just wants to code dump, the community can still fix their own bugs and if it becomes frequent enough a maintained fork might appear.
As a general rule, we should always keep in mind that startups are founded to make money for the startup's founders. If other stakeholders such as customers, employees, investors, and so on are able to make money off of it, that's a plus. But we shouldn't expect founders to do anything other than act in a manner facilitating the generation of wealth for themselves.

RH is no different than any other startup in this regard. They aren't going to open themselves up to the risk of not following a margin agreement in the name of "the revolution!" They are in the business of making money, even if that means users lose their shirts.

And if people have been trading GME, AMC, et al on margin? (I mean, unless the government steps in or something?) I'm afraid a lot of them are going to be losing their shirts in the coming weeks.
Congratulations on buying into wikipedias politically "correct" definition.

How about https://www.dictionary.com/browse/pension

Or maybe for clarity consider the word "pensioner"

Is it still a "pension" when contributions are made your whole life and it crashes to 0 and you never make a withdraw?

Most people call defined contribution plans "retirement savings" plans and defined benefit "pensions". While conceptually at a high level they are the same thing, the difference is in who bears the risk when the plan is underfunded. In the first the risk is entirely born by the individual which frequently doesn't have any choice in the investment companies much less the investments. The latter the risk is squarely on the shoulders of a larger organization, be that a company or as the last resort the government. Aka the risk is socialized/insured.
Webull and Fidelity were the only two I believe ?
Are you matching only upper-case strings? If not, that could help filter out some common words.
>Thanks to the Reagan administration, that's fine, yes? It would violate Twitter's free speech rights to force them to do otherwise?

Well, I don't particularly care for a corporation's free speech rights. I think it's better for citizens to have free speech rights, not corporations. Besides, I don't think Twitter's free speech rights are in danger or would be in danger if they were forced not to censor people. They could still print whatever message of their own (Twitter's) they want, exercizing their free speech. They just wouldn't be able to exercize censorship.

Same way I want net neutrality from ISPs, I want it from social media.
And suffer from identity theft and possibly malicious acts against their employees? I don't think it is preferable for many Americans.
It wasn’t rh alone, it’s also most other discount brokerages.
An Update on Market Volatility
“Reasoning about code” is a scam
Zuck really pulling out all the stops to try to appease the Biden administration.
"Apple is making proactive moves to protect their store's rating system reputation"

Ah, that's a good one.
If I have a car that worked great 50 years ago but haven't been able to turn it on since the 70s when my neighbor destroyed the engine, I would not call that a proven, working car.

The "existing tools" have been proven to have a major weakness, namely they can be neutered by regulatory capture. Unless you can get everyone to magically forget how they circumvented the rules last time, you can't simply restart using them.
I would read each and every word of a four page document, especially if it's finance related. Unfortunately, some people won't read anything longer than a tweet.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25948391.
I'm sorry, is it an inalienable human right to use other people's property to spread speech now? When did that happen?
Because they are using an app with no fees. This is what fees get you on some other platforms.
Use the New Windows Terminal
> I'm concerned about this because this is a 1st amendment problem. Let grown adults gamble.

Gambling isn't even legal in most states. Good luck arguing that.
Or perhaps those are the most vocal people. The other people might just be trying to wait things out instead of being particularly vocal about it.
Telegram wasn't banned in Russia, it was just a PR show.
Azlo Bank accounts close on March 31, 2021
Just got this email:

"As we announced on Thursday, Jan. 7, Azlo will close, and we wanted to inform you that we will cease account operations on March 31, 2021."
Used to be you had three days. I would fault no brokerage for not waiting three days for a Robinhood account holder to cough up the dough on a GME margin call. Hell, wait three hours and RH might have to come back asking for more.
MM is different from RH. RH would actually need to get collateral (or raise money) to allow its customers to trade GME at this volatility. I really think the anger should be directed at Wall Street and the Fed for creating a frothy investment environment and not doing anything about it. RH OTOH is trying to be a disruptive player.
This actually rules out a substantive number of registrars. I have a statement from an account manager at our wholesale supplier arguing that the requirement to know both the email address and password is considered "two factor" in the industry.

I don't see why offering MFA hasn't been made a requirement in order to be an accredited domain registrar.
This isn't some little detail hidden in the TOS. This is what a margin account is. If you do not have your required maintenance margin (and that may be a complicated calculation), the broker can and will sell things for you to protect themselves.

This is, frankly, common sense. If you deposit $100, buy $300 of stock, and that stock falls below $200, your account's equity will go below zero and your broker is in trouble. If this happens on a large enough scale, the market will be in trouble. The broker will try to protect itself by liquidating your position before this happens, and they may even be required to by market rules.

(The actual calculation of required margin is quite complex for good reason.)
> the perfectly executed short ladder today

I missed this. What's this referencing?
This will probably be my least popular post ever, but the explanation needs to get out there for why Robinhood stopped trading on GME.

Selling a stock short is NOT illegal. It is a perfectly valid type of investment according to the SEC:

“D. Are short sales legal?
Although the vast majority of short sales are legal, abusive short sale practices are illegal. For example, it is prohibited for any person to engage in a series of transactions in order to create actual or apparent active trading in a security or to depress the price of a security for the purpose of inducing the purchase or sale of the security by others. Thus, short sales effected to manipulate the price of a stock are prohibited.”

Basically – you can’t short sell a stock to manipulate the price down so you can buy a lot more of it later. If you believe a stock is overpriced and short sell it, that is legal. That is exactly what tons of retail traders and hedge funds do every day, including on Gamestop.

On the other hand, manipulating a stock price upwards to cause a short squeeze IS illegal according to the same SEC article:

“Although some short squeezes may occur naturally in the market, a scheme to manipulate the price or availability of stock in order to cause a short squeeze is illegal.”

Unprecedented numbers of people on Reddit, Twitter, and elsewhere collaborated to intentionally create a short squeeze on GME in the last week. No one talked about a fundamental case why Gamestop the company was worth a lot of money and would be successful in the future; instead everyone made the argument that due to a very high short interest of 100%+, that a short squeeze would send the price “to the moon”. That is illegal according to the SEC.

Multiple brokerages, especially Robinhood, probably had their attorneys tell them that “Hey, you are aiding and abetting illegal activity by enabling a short squeeze and could be liable criminally or civilly if you continue to allow this blatant illegal activity on your platform”. So they decided to stop it by only allowing people to close their positions rather than open new ones in support of the short squeeze.

Another strong reason is that if the short squeeze caused the GME stock to go to 5000 in a sudden leap, tons of traders (both retail and professional) could instantly go broke, and then the brokerage (Robinhood) would be left holding the bag. For example, picture a retail investor with a Robinhood account had sold call options in the amount of $100,000 and their account was worth $200,000. If the price gapped from 300 to 5000 and those options were exercised, that trader could have a loss of $10,000,000. He would lose the value of his account, $200,000… but the brokerage would have to make up the rest of the settlement and take a loss of $9,800,000. Now multiply that by thousands of accounts…. no brokerage wants to take the risk of being bankrupted, so they shut it down.

The two strong reasons Robinhood and other brokers stopped trading was to prevent legal liability from enabling illegal activity on their platform, and for wanting to avoid potentially massive banktuptcy from traders unable to cover their losses.
Is this principled? It seems to me like going against your principles/ideals just to stick it to someone you (usually) disagree with.
>Everyone pays for government school, but want to a Christian education, then you have to pay twice.

Work with your government to have you taxes assigned to the Christian school. Here in Ontario Canada when you file your taxes you select if your child is attending catholic school and the catholic school board gets revenue equal to the number of people attending.
Work for the Internet. Join the Real Robin Hood Clan
Given the hype, the most likely scenario is a > 2X price spike in the first few minutes of trading regardless of the initial market cap ($100B+?). For those of us who believe that, what is the best strategy for purchasing shares ? It's doubtful brokers will allow market orders the previous night since the ticker might not yet exist, and if one places a market order during the first few minutes the cynic in me predicts a retail trader will get the worst deal.
Exactly, while WeBull firmly pointed the finger at their market makers, Robinhood is treating it's customers like children and telling us they're banning trades for our own good while secretly collaborating with Wall Street in the background. They are a disgrace to the name "Robinhood."
Does bash have an option to write out the history before running the command? Usually history is written in PROMPT_COMMAND, which runs after the command completes.
Would be cool if it was MPL, BSD, or MIT Licensed. Could eventually be embedded into browsers.
Officially? Who knows. But the shorts bleeding the hardest covered during the dump this morning. Also notice a handful of trading platforms started re-allowing trading on GME and AMC after that.
It's worse than that. You implement your perfect, minimum capability system. Your programmers really implement that. Everything's great...

... until someone from marketing shows up, and says, "Hey, we also need it to...", and the program now needs a bunch of new capabilities.
IBM RPG Tutorial
https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/upgrading-to-go...

Robinhood let’s you borrow money to buy stocks. If you borrow $10k to buy GME at $300 and it dropped to $100. There’s a risk to RH that you won’t be able to payback the loan. RH most likely will liquidate the position before it even hits $100 to mitigate the risk on the loan depending how leveraged you are.
> If you start sending out illegal hate mail to millions of people, you bet you'll be "deplatformed" by the USPS.

If you start sending out legal harassment mail to millions of people, you'll get a discount.
This significantly constrains demand while at the same time it pressures people to put their supply in the market (sell it off). So they're lowering demand and increasing supply, which is sure to drive the price down and make people lose money.

Likely to the benefit of institutional investors-- the same ones that lost money on the squeeze-- to make money on shorts they places at the top.

Doesn't smell right. It might even just (relatively innocently) be from soft pressure from the SEC to limit a perceived market manipulation, but it will still induce losses in positions that users might have sold at higher prices.
Because a16z led funding rounds for both Coinbase and Medium.
Let me know when churches start paying taxes...
> I suspect it's the latter.

It's absolutely the latter. GME is a meme stock that people will forget about in 3 months. If 2008 didn't cause anyone to go to jail (where millions lost their houses and retirements), manipulating a short squeeze on a failing company certainly won't.
I'm going to argue no. I wish I could find the HN commentator who said what I've long thought better than I ever could... it was on a cryptocurrency thread, naturally.

Such a thing will always have some kind of "emissions" or way of differentiating it. Oh, there will be layers of obfuscation, redundancy, and such. But the bottom line is (and especially to be scalable, have "network effects", be non-nerd accessible) by having an identity... you can be identified.

From there, it's all about power and control and that "might makes right". Nothing more than the use of language is required to censor. It can always be outlawed and even if it's hard to find, hard to prove. If it really matters "they" will find a way, however arcane or mundane.

Not saying it's a futile effort. Just that "power" can always find a way to put its boot down to stop a thing it feels threatened by until the concept of power itself is what is at stake.
So the government would force private corporations to let anyone say what they wanted on their sites? And this new sweeping government power would somehow.... restrict the government?

Do you not see how that's contradictory?

And what would it even look like? Would Hacker News no longer be allowed to have moderators?
I didn't say anything about needing to update multiple at once, sorry if I gave that impression. Was just ranting about what I've seen in general.
VM Manager is three separate services, one of which is "OS config management", which is more akin to Ansible (or Puppet, Chef, etc), i.e. provisioning software on a system. The other two services look after themselves TBH.

The OS config mangement in practice is a daemon that polls for "guest policies" every 10 minutes. Their example policies will give you a good idea of what it does:

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/os-config-management/c...

Or better still, the `google_os_config_guest_policies` terraform resource:

https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/lat...

(Essentially it's pretty basic stuff: configuring package repos, installing packages, running scripts, and copying artefacts).
> Would it though? From what I understand EU has way better social safety nets, yet much smaller entrepreneurship rates compared to USA.

Try firing an employee in France. It's a two year process minimum and in the end a judge might rule you can't do it.

Also the regulatory landscape in the EU imposes such a high burden on entrepreneurs. Coupled with investors being way more conservatives.
How much Amazon spy garbage is there on a Kindle, and can you get rid of it all with a jailbreak?
Because when the people are allowed to freely share their ideas with one another and talk about them without interference the cream rises to the top.

There is historical evidence of this, the monarchs of the centuries past, the Catholic church, they all stifled the ability for people to freely discuss ideas, and even killed people for sharing the wrong ones. As soon as the printing press was invented that allowed people to share ideas freely you had revolts against them all over the next few centuries leading to representative democracies and republics, the enlightenment and development of ideas such as human dignity and individual rights, diversity of religion in the west took hold, the end of theocratic rule over Europe, and it all culminated in the creation of the US and an end to global colonialism mid 20th century. We owe our great way of life and our emergence from theocratic and monarchical shackles in large part to the ability to express and share ideas freely, this is a big reason why western societies hold that right in high esteem, it was a resounding success, it worked for us up until now and it will continue to do so if we let it.
> It's unfortunate that the one time someone from the opposing party agrees with her

That's not “the one time” such agreement has occurred.

Here's the bills she's cosponsored with Republicans:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/browse#congress=116&c...

> she calls back on something they don't agree on (and refuses to work with them because of it).

Sure, complicity in a violent, deadly attack on one's workplace (even when it isn't the national Capitol and part of a coup attempt) is the kind of thing most people would just brush off and not let get in the way of working with people: actions have no consequences whatsoever.
This is literally an outright lie. Initialized Capital does not own Coinbase.
Of course, you're literally borrowing money from them to buy securities.
They don't do this. See https://nypost.com/2020/12/17/sec-slaps-robinhood-app-with-6... .
> Really we need limits on short sales beyond a certain % of float.

The market seemed to be doing a fine job of correcting. Not sure we need a regulation to prevent sophisticated investors from throwing their money away. Transparency sounds good though. Also, my impression is that short interest data has a high delay/low frequency of publishing; more transparency there could be useful too.
What a meaningless title.
I don't believe parent said they were forced, only that they would do it. And that makes sense, since their desire is to minimize damage to their brand.

There is a simple solution to this if you don't like the way they behave: stop using their product, and recommend others do the same.

Of course, your not using it doesn't prevent others from using it if they want to, but that's freedom of choice for you.
Permanently working from home for some people like me is a direct way to depression. For someone who lives alone going to the office is essential to have social interactions without which the mental health can be severely damaged. I'm terrified by the possibility of working from home becoming a norm for the tech companies. It can be also a serious problem for novice developers who are greatly dependent on working closely with their seniors for their professional development and also for more experienced ones who are at a new job and need help to step in.
Lots of people are going to take this as a blow against small investors. Janet Yellen's taken $7 million in speaking fees from Melvin's largest backer.
Also if Robinhood wins this, theoretically they can do the same to $AAPL, $MSFT, $AMZN , now how does the uber rich , fund managers, union funds, 401k etc etc would react? where does this stop.
Its either a free trade market , or its not!
Funny, but seriously if BlackRock found out there would be an iShares Becky ETF in a month with a 1% mangement fee.
Nope. They stopped buying of the actual equity. All you could do was sell.
In addition, some states may penalize the employer for not paying state payroll taxes including state unemployment insurance for the employee. Realistically, this may be difficult for a state to determine but if there is a lease or mortgage involved it could make it more likely.

In any case, as an employee I may not care that much about paying back taxes later or whatever, but I think you're right there could be unintended consequences with this.
But I don't think they are expecting the backlash that this had received. As a Robinhood user I am making it clear that this is not okay by withdrawing all of my funds and cancelling my Gold account, and I hope others will do the same.
true but the analogy falls apart when you realize that 99% of phone conversations are peer to peer and between 2-4 people.

social media posts can be a single person communicating with millions.

the damage per unit of effort is much much lower for the unmoderated phone vs the unmoderated social
It's worse then that.

We need to put more people at risk, because we can't meet some nebulous, ever-shifting standard that asks us to trade human lives for dollars of economic activity. Nobody wants to pin down exactly how many dollars they think a human life is worth, though.

On the one hand, we've got every special interest group under the sun loudly shouting that their business is special, and must be allowed to operate as if nothing has changed over the past year.

On the other hand, we've got public health - a communal good, that everyone is responsible for, but nobody gets held responsible for.